National Geographic feature on climate change and European lakes

The effects of climate change are already beginning to be seen on European lakes, according to new research. As profiled in a recent National Geographic feature, which references the MARS and REFRESH projects, Erik Jeppesen of Aarhus University, Denmark suggests that a warming and increasingly volatile climate is causing increasing algal blooms in European lakes, and fundamentally altering aquatic food webs, including the size and distribution of fish populations.

Jeppesen suggests that the ecological resilience of lake ecosystems can be increased through reducing the amount of nutrient pollution that is released into them, “The benefits are clear because of the synergistic effects between temperature and nutrient loading. Reducing the amount of nutrients available also increases the resilience of a lake to climate change.”

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Features, interviews and analyses on freshwater conservation, science and policy.

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The blog was founded and edited between 2010-14 by the BioFresh project, an EU-funded project that built a global information platform for scientists and ecosystem managers with access to all available data describing the distribution, status and trends of global freshwater biodiversity.

Since 2014, the blog has been managed and edited by the MARS project – an EU-funded project which investigates how multiple stressors affect rivers, lakes and estuaries.

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